I just ordered Civ 4 and Dungeon Siege 2 from Play.com – I’m happy.

Why I bought DS2? Because I wanted to try the Ultima 5 remake on DS1. Some of the guys in the community are involved and from the word of mouth it seems rather good. Now this doesn’t have anything to do with DS2, but just now a game magazine in Italy is being sold with DS bundled. Perfect timing!

Now I never bought or tried DS. I *hated* Summoner and disliked basically everything about NWN (design, gameplay, graphic. It’s clunky and dull. I hated it all and I still love so much more the previous games from Bioware and Black Isle). I’m also one of the few that never felt so hot for Diablo 2. I find it straining (I only liked the mess-battles with zerg of enemies).

So I always considered DS a “lesser” clone to keep as far away as possible. Yesterday I got the magazine with DS so that I could play the Ultima remake (still downloading). I gave it a quick look… and loved it.

Yeah, it’s a simple game, it isn’t anything crazy. But it has a so good interface, and controls, and mechanics. This game is really good, simple but functional to what it wants to be. It lets you play and enjoy the flow. It doesn’t get in the way. It isn’t annoying or unresponsive. Smooth. Sleek. Polished and well planned.

I loved how in just a few minutes your character has so many patterns available, all accessible. So you don’t have to just choose a weapon and swing it till the boredom kicks in. Instead you can quickly swap between melee, ranged and spells. I loved how I could swap to the bow to take down the enemies running to me and then swap back to a mace to finish them off when they were close enough. I liked how smooth and functional are the controls and how everything you need is easily accessible and serviceable. It has the best layout/UI of the genre.

This is an “action rpg”. The purpose of an action rpg is exactly to be serviceable and let you play it. Enjoy the flow. It’s all about the execution and I find the execution in DS very good. The battles are fun and I just loved the graphic. The game is old but it still doesn’t look bad to me. In particular it looks SO MUCH BETTER than NWN. The woods are decent and not just a tiled texture along the borders and I loved the z-depth in some parts of the game and the variable height, while, on the other side, everything in NWN is so flat, featureless and generic. In DS you feel inside an environment, in NWN you feel inside a shoe box. It also doesn’t have all the annoying quirks of the NWN engine (which does a so bad work with the structures covering the visual). The animations are also so much better compared to those in NWN.

I fiddled with the editor and loved it too. Fuck the tilesets, here you can at least connect the terrain the way you like (it feels like playing Legos) instead of just pasting together generic areas that look like shit. I cannot even suffer the player-built modules in NWN because everything looks too much the same and plays always so horribly (there’s just no way to shrug off the dull mood and create something that doesn’t feel exactly the same. You have the dialogues and that’s it).

I really find DS so better under most of the aspects. It may be more superficial but I still wonder why the mod communities didn’t use it instead of that clunky NWN or, even worst, Morrowind. DS seems to have very solid basis. There’s some space to build on top of that and give it some more depth, if you want (then I don’t know how flexible it is, I’m curious to see how the Lazarus team modded it).

That pretty much explains why I suddenly went to order DS2. If it’s better, I want.

EDIT: The more I look into this the more I LOVE it. You can basically do everything you like with the game. From rebuilding the UI till messing directly with the DLLs. It’s wonderful.